Peggy Chong

Peggy Chong is currently a private contractor providing consulting services and employment training to governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations. Her work involves the dissemination of job-search, resumé creation and distribution services designed to help individuals--with or without disabilities--to secure competitive employment. She also teaches independant travel to the Blind.

Peggy Chong was born in Minnesota during the late '50's. Diagnosed from birth with legal blindness, her vision was such that professional educators of the blind were convinced--incorrectly, as it turned out--that she did not need to learn Braille. Although the large print material and magnification glasses she used provided some access to printed information, it was not until she developed skill in some of the nonvisual techniques used by successful blind people that the handling of printed information ceased to become a continual struggle.

Determined to imbue the service delivery system for the blind with a more positive and forward-looking philosophy, Peggy joined with other blind people in Minneapolis, Minnesota to establish Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions (BLIND, Inc.), a training center for the blind designed to encourage its students to achieve self-sufficient and productive lives. In 1985, Peggy Chong accepted the position of President of the Board of BLIND, Inc., a position she held for ten years. During that time, she worked with many students of the program who had varying levels of vision, encouraging them to learn the alternative nonvisual techniques of blindness and fueling their imaginations to dream of a life where each of them could live and work in their communities on a basis of absolute equality with their sighted peers. She also helped many of them to make intelligent decisions about their vision--when it would be helpful and when it would hinder progress toward independence.

In 1998, Peggy obtained a position with the Job Opportunities for the Blind program at the National Center for the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland. For more than a year, she led a succession of intensive two-week training sessions designed to teach computer and other important job-readiness skills to blind individuals seeking employment. She also worked individually with each job candidate to refine the job search according to the unique needs of each, and she worked with numerous employers to ensure that the characteristic of blindness was accurately perceived and the blind job applicant treated fairly. When a job was offered to any of her students, she provided assistance before and after securing the job to ensure that each of them had the tools needed to succeed in the new position. Sometimes this involved connecting her student with other blind persons doing that same job somewhere in the United States. At other times, she provided information and advice about new, non-traditional techniques that could be used to perform the job successfully.

Later, Peggy served for three years as the Program Manager for NFB-NEWSLINE®. In this position, she formed valuable relationships with national and local newspapers, community-based service delivery organizations and rehabilitation programs, and literally thousands of blind men and women--many of them newly-blind--across the country.

For more than thirty years, Peggy has been active in a variety of community organizations: the National Federation of the Blind, the American Cancer society, the Hawthorn Area Community Council, and the Cooperating Fund Drive. She also played an active role in the private schools attended by her daughter while she was growing up.